meme

I am terribly behind with the reading of others' blogs, so I just now noticed that I was tagged for the 8 random things one. Whoops! Sorry for the delay in doing this.

Um... random things. Yeah.

1. I think we may have found our house. It's insanely gorgeous, but we are worried about the financing due to corporate adendums (WTF are those?!). Yeah, it needs some work, and I'll be on the hunt for new stained glass windows to replace those that have been removed, but hot damn is it everything I've dreamed of in a house, but with a smaller yard.

2. I got my Ravelry invite yesterday. Yay! Haven't done much other than basic account set up so far - I am blackrayne there, of course. Will add stuff to it when I have access to a different computer.

3. Poison ivy sucks. When I encounter it, even just looking at it funny, I am cursed with it's itchy, bumpy presence. The last time I had it my left thigh turned into a huge puffy red swollen mess in hours. This time, more than 7 years later, I have random spots. Some on my right forearm, some on my left forearm. Some on my right thigh, some on buth feet, and the worst - a line of it on the back of my left hand, where it got into a scratch. Normally it takes major steriods for it to go away, alas, I haven't a doctor or insurance, so I am suffering with Calamine lotion which barely touches it. For every spot that goes away I seem to have three new ones appear too.

4. Not that you could guess from my last post with the crappy sock photo, but I went to the Art Institute of Philadelphia for photography. I graduated in 1992 with honors and a best portfolio award. And these days all it gets used on are taking photos of potential houses and socks late at night.

5. Due to my anti-social nature, I am currently completely devoid of any friends outside those I know online. Sure, I know people in real life, but since moving, other than one person who is technically a friend of my husband's, I know no one local to me. Sometimes this bothers me because I don't have anyone outside of my family to talk to, to hang out with, to shop with. Well, ok, I never did really do the shopping with friends thing, but you get the point. Most of the time, though, this doesn't bother me at all, and the one person I had started talking to locally I gave up on a few weeks ago because she was way too bubbly for my tastes.

6. I am not at all sorry that I didn't go to Convergence in Portland this year. Sure, it was the 13th year, which would have been awesome if not for the drama that has been surrounding this event for weeks, but whatever. I've never been to one before, though I have said for the last 7 years that I will go to the next one, but that has yet to happen.

7. Related to the above, I honestly can't say that I even identify as "goth" anymore. Not that I really did for that long anyway. I like my completely healthy undyed natural brown hair now that it's finally all grown out from years of bleach and dye torture. I like my blue jeans that actually fit and my Tevas and my not remotely goth but still predominately darker wardrobe. Give me a long velvet dress and heels and I'll look at you like you have three heads and 21 eyes. And then I'll put on my black tank top and my bondage shorts and my Tevas and bask in my comfort.

8. I frequently wonder if I am completely insane, rambling on about the strangest things. did my answers to this meme make any sense? No, probably not. But I am hot and sweaty and itchy and none of it really matters in the grand scheme of things. Or does it?

Um... not tagging anyone, mainly because I really need to get to the store for something to stop this itching!

Show and tell Friday...

Ok, I lied about no photos for a while. It's very hastily edited in iPhoto, though, as opposed to PhotoShop, so the quality sucks (well, partly due to the lack of decent editing, mostly due to it being taken last night with the flash). But... sock #1 is DONE!

Starting #2 sometime today, but first, the pool needs water in it.

OK... pool is filled and cold, sock #2 is started and here are some basic specs on sock #1...

KnitPicks Bare, superwash/nylon version, hand-dyed by me with Wilton's colors (blended a few different colors for each), made to be self-striping in a pattern of 4 rows bronze, 8 rows blue. My recipient is (obviously) a Ravenclaw, preferring the book colors. I am using size 0 DPNs, from the Susan Bates sock set, except for the heel, which was an afterthought heel done with Clover bamboo DPNs of the same size. They are toe-up, the top of them is based on the Thuja pattern from Knitty, except that it's over 76 stitches instead of whatever the pattern calls for. The cuff is K2P2 ribbing, though I may frog it and do a 1x1 ribbing instead to blend in with the Thuja pattern better.

Last thought... if you missed the first Hogwarts Sock Swap have no fear - there will be a second round, sign-ups start July 14th.

Socks and sheep

Sorry, no photos for a while, two of the three computers here are dead and the living one, Chris's iBook, hasn't got any photo editing software on it, nor does it have enough free space for me to start adding things he won't use. So all photos are on hold until we can get my iMac or the girls' eMac up and running again.

For the record, the iMac has been dead since just before we moved back in January, the fan keeled over and it overheated. Not sure if just a new fan will fix it either. The eMac, according to Apple's help pages, at the least needs new memory sticks, but it may be more than just them dying as well. Hopefully we will be able to get one (preferably both) fixed before long, as I really dislike using the iBook.

Anyway... this isn't a Mac blog, so onto the socks and sheep.

Socks - the cuff was looking really tight on them, and they wouldn't even fit Harley so the cuff got frogged. The heel is knitted, I did it before frogging the cuff to see if having it in place would help, but it didn't. I ditched the Razor Shell pattern and am now using the basic pattern for the ribbing of Knitty's Thuja (no link, sorry) instead. I also did a little increasing right at the heel to give me a few more stitches and it looks like it should be fine now. I am up to the third blue section of the stripes, having done the majority of the new cuff in the last two days.

Sheep - this weekend was the Waynesburg Sheep and Fiber festival. We drove down yesterday, it took about an hour to get there, maybe a little more. Not nearly as big as I was expecting or hoping for, but there was some lovely yarn and fiber to be had. I didn't feel like spending $20.00 on one 240ish yard skein of positively gorgeous yarn, though, but I did get three4 ounce bags of wool top to spin - one's a grayish black, one's a bright red and one's a darker red. I removed them from their bags when we got home, as they had been sitting in the sun with condensation inside the bags, they are airing out on the enclosed front porch. I am thinking I should have instead gotten some undyed merino instead, it was cheaper and most likely not as smelly. Oh well.

This is an insanely long post. Time to get back to the sock knitting!

OMG another sock post!

The top pattern for my socks, Razor Shell, is coming along nicely. I think I am going to stop when there's a total of 4 repeats of the pattern per color.

thoughts on variances in needle sizes

I recently got a set of Clover bamboo DPNs in a size 0 in the mail. I was planning to use these to start the second sock of the pair I am working on, so as to not forget how I did the toe and to avoid possible Second Sock Syndrome.

So the needles arrived and I decided to compare them to the current needles, which are a set of gold toned Susan Bates size 0's from the sock set of needles. And my findings?

The bamboo are a hair bigger around than the Susan Bates ones. So then I pulled out one of the KnitPicks DPNs in a size 0 (these are for the person who is receiving the socks I am currently making), and those... they are a hair smaller than the SB needles.

This wouldn't annoy me so much if I had started with a good pair of needles, but even with my set of 5 SB needles, there are inconsistancies in size - two of them are pointier than the other three, and two (not necessarily the two pointier ones) feel smaller in my hands.

I am seriously contemplating trekking to the one LYS to see if they have Addi size 0's, but do I really need three sets of DPNs in a size 0?

The smallness of the bamboo ones freaks me out too. I expect to break at least two of them the first time I do decide to use them.

And even worse than all this? I realized the other day that the needle case I made for my DPNs doesn't have a slot (or slots) for anything smaller than a 1. I wonder if I can tweak it a little, make the size 1 and 2 slots a little narrower to squeeze in a third slot for the smaller than size 1's. Unfortnately, the sizes are written on in silver pen. And I don't think it'll come off.